At present it is possible for electronic commerce transaction to be made using web sites accessed through the Internet. Such e-commerce allows products and services to be purchased direct via web sites maintained by manufacturers or retailers of products. Recently, mobile cellular telephones with Internet functionality have been developed, facilitating mobile electronic commerce (m-commerce).
An electronic commerce transaction normally requires a purchaser to supply the vendor with personal data such as credit card details, delivery address, contact details etc. This information must therefore be transferred from the purchaser to the vendor. This is normally achieved by providing a form on the web-site, which the purchaser is expected to complete. The filling-in of such a form slows down the payment transaction and, being laborious, reduces a consumer's willingness to complete the transaction.
So-called electronic wallet application programs have been developed in order to facilitate the transfer of personal data while maintaining the security and confidentiality of that data.
An electronic wallet application is a mechanism that collects and protects personal data e.g. bank card details, contact details and personal details. An electronic wallet application is usually attached to a browser application of an Internet terminal and it enables data to be the transferred from the wallet to a remote sever via a form on the web-site. The automatic filling of fields in a web-site form by an electronic wallet is provided by the open Internet standard (IETF RFC 2706) ECML (Electronic Commerce Modeling Language).
There are, however, drawbacks related to the use of an electronic wallet. The tool bar of the web browser on the terminal contains an additional appropriate icon that takes up space. This is a particular problem for handheld mobile terminals, such as mobile cellular telephones, which have limited size displays.
EP02396148 (unpublished) describes the display of a wallet icon, for user selection, only if the current web-page supports the ECML standard.
However, not all web pages that require personal data will support the ECML standard, in which case the automatic data transfer based on ECML fields in a wallet program cannot be utilized.
It would be desirable to provide an alternative way of using an electronic wallet application.